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reticulate menorah II
Monday, December 26 2016
[REDACTED]
This evening after taking a bath, I watched three episodes of the first season of Deadwood (Ca's recommendation) while building a copper pipe menorah for Dina. Back last winter, you see, before I got my job at The Organization, I'd had the idea that maybe I didn't like writing code, especially give the constant changes of languages, technologies, syntax, and style. So I'd told Gretchen that maybe I should just make copper lamps instead. This idea had found its way to Dina, who'd loved the idea and immediately commissioned a menorah for a friend as a wedding gift. So I'd gone and bought a bunch of copper fittings and pipe with the idea of quantifying materials and time to better know how to price such things. But then I hadn't done anything, not through the spring, the summer, or fall. It was only after realizing that Gretchen would be meeting Dina tomorrow that I got around to doing the work of making the menorah. Much of that work involves cutting 44 segments of half-inch copper pipe, each of them an inch in length, to use to bridge the fittings together. My favorite of my menorahs was the reticulate one I'd made for Dina's wedding to Gilaud back in 2005, and I used a photo of it as the design template. Just having a pre-existing design to work from was very helpful, though it takes time (and some erosion of the hands) to cut 44 one-inch pieces (and four 2.5 inch pieces) of copper with a pipe cutter. Worse than that was the messy job of piecing all the fittings together with solder flux in every joint. I made the mistake of working barehanded, and not only did I cut myself a couple times on vicious burrs remaining from the cutting process, but the greasy, acidic flux worked its way into those cuts and made them burn just enough to significantly degrade my mood. I remember thinking that with an attitude like the one I had, it was unlikely that the menorah would turn out any good. But the geometry of something made with so many fittings tends to be self-enforcing, and I could tell I had a winner the moment I'd soldered the main structure together out on the laboratory deck. The only way I could have failed at that point would've been had I used too much solder, but I didn't. For the rest of my work with solder flux, I kept my hands inside latex gloves.
After attaching the two halves of the base, I crowned each of the menorah's branch with a half-inch female NPT screw fitting. In the past I'd used half-inch-to-inch adapter fittings for these crowns, but the NPT screw fitting had been considerably cheaper. Still, the materials alone added up to a substantial figure. Here's the estimated price of materials, with prices from the Home Depot website, using "contractor packs" for the elbows and T-fittings.
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Reticulate Memnorah Bill of Materials:
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| Item | Math | Price |
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54.5 inches of type-M half inch copper pipe | 11.93 * 54.5/120 | 5.42
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23 T-fittings | 9.10 + 9.10 + 0.3 * 9.10 | 20.93
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12 90-degree elbows | 3.96 + 0.2 * 3.96 | 4.72
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9 female NPT screw fittings | 2.68 * 9 | 24.12
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Total | !?!?!? | 55.19
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And that doesn't include solder, solder flux, latex gloves, fuel needed to do the soldering, or tax.
I stayed up awhile after that, filing off bits of extra solder and buffing the copper with an overly-aggressive wire brush until it shined. Here was the result (photographed the next day):
(Click to enlarge.)
(Click to enlarge.)
Overall, it had taken over three hours of constant work to make.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?161226 feedback
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